Crafty Catch Up – Spice of Life, Halloween and the Start of Christmas

21/10/2015

Can you tell that the crochet is completely taking over my life at the moment? If you follow me on Instagram it’s probably pretty obvious. It seems that every spare minute is spent with a hook in my hand these days and I’m loving it!

I’m onto the final stretch of the main body of the Spice of Life CAL now and I’m already starting to feel a bit sad about the fact that it will be all over soon. The pattern has you repeating the first half of the blanket in different colours for the second half, so there are no more new stitches to learn, but instead it’s great practice of what you have already learnt and I’m trying to make the second half a bit better as a result.

The main problem I had with the first half of my blanket is that the work pulled in at the sides a bit in the shell section – basically my tension wasn’t right. This second time around I have gone up from a 4mm hook to a 4.5mm one and it has made all the difference. When I was working the shells I was a bit worried that they looked a little loose this time, but when they were all complete and I continued with the next rows I saw that actually they were just right, and most importantly the edges weren’t pulled in at all on that section.

I’m just up to the waves section now and as I found that the most difficult first time round I’m hoping that I manage them a bit better this time. Now I’m a bit clearer on what all the individual stitches are I think it shouldn’t be quite so hard, but time will tell. Certainly I won’t be trying to do them whilst the kids are around or whilst drinking a glass of wine this time!

I have managed to squeeze in a couple of other crafty bits too this week. I’ve made a small start on one of four little cross stitch kits that I picked up in Hobbycraft recently. I love cross stitch and I’ve been rubbish in the last few years at actually finishing any, but I’m hoping that these tiny projects will be completed as Christmas cards for a few people this year. Please remind me of this when I’m in a panic the week before Christmas!

The other thing that I’ve been up to is something that I’ve never really tried before, but is again Christmas related – an advent house. I was actually sent this by a PR company along with a nice gift voucher for Hobbycraft so that I could use it to buy whatever I needed to decorate it with. Seeing as I made a pocket advent calendar for Little Miss C last year I thought I ought to do something for Master C too so this was the perfect prompt. I’ve started the painting, but I can see that this is going to be quite a long job. Fingers crossed that I get it done in time. In a way it feels really organised to be starting this in October, but there’s not much of October left really and it needs to be finished at the end of November!

The final thing I managed this month was to finally get my Cricut out again. I’ve not used this anywhere near enough lately and it’s been making me a bit sat to see it sat there unloved. For playgroup this week were were wanting to do spotty spiders and so I too a photo of a spider in a kids craft book and used the Cricut to cut out several of them to take along to playgroup. So much quicker than getting the scissors out and doing it by hand.

Whilst I was in design space I also cut out a load of these cute little spider tags which I am hoping to turn into some spider bunting for Halloween. Watch this space!

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Comments

I have loved watching your progress with the crochet blanket, it’s amazing! Have fun decorating the Advent Calendar too, I made one last year and was so pleased with it (just a tip, when you take out the boxes to paint them make a note of where they came from, I didn’t and found that they didn’t all fit in as exactly when I put them back!)